Pre-processing on a PPC mac is not as powerful as using avisynth via crossover. However, the folks at BerliOS have done an amazing job with their opensource program Avidemux. With it, many newer anime DVDs can be Inverse Telecined and Deinterlaced. First and foremost, please read my sticky in General AMV to familiarise yourself with the terms and concepts being used here.

ii. Special Thanks

Special thanks to LantisEscudo and Shaggy for offering up their G4 systems, in addition to my own, for testing purposes. This guide would not exist if it weren't for their help.

Left to right, you have: open, save, properties, load/run project, save project, calculator, and your screen set ups: input only, output only, side by side, stacked, and separate windows. For those familiar with VirtualDub or VirtualDubMod, side by side is probably the most intuitive.

Under Video, you have your codec choice, your codec configuration button (opens a new window), and your video filters button (opens a new window). You must select a codec type to get access to these buttons, but the codec is not set in stone.

Under Audio, same idea. Codec choice, followed by configuration and filters buttons.

Format is what we normally refer to as "container" on the Org. You have choices between different containers even, like different types of AVI, MP4, MPEG, etc... After testing, I have determined that the control over x264 given by Avidemux is great for distribution of completed projects, regardless of whether the user is on a PPC or an Intel. The sticky will be modified to reflect this.

Of course, to the right of all of your choices is your Video Monitor(s) area. If you choose dual view, unprocessed input is on the left, processed output is on the right.

Below that is the timeline, and above Selection is an actual, honest-to-god TRACKING WHEEL so if you want to scan "scrub" through, just go ahead and click on the wheel and spin it backwards or forwards. Crazy intuitive.

Under that are your (BLUE) controls: play, pause, previous frame, next frame, previous intra frame, next intra frame, previous black frame, next black frame, first frame, last frame. Your (RED) controls, A and B, are for clipping. A is in, B is out. Selection tells you what A and B currently are set to. Selection is indicated by a thin blue box on the timeline around the area to be clipped.

Under that, you can type in your specific Frame or Time stamp, press enter, and go directly to that place in the video.

And, finally, volume, of course. Not that it is entirely relevant for our purposes until export.

III. Filtering

Click the open button, find your VIDEO_TS folder. Select the first .VOB file. Avidemux will ask if you want to index, you do. It will ask if you want to append segments, you do. It might take a few seconds, but then it will display video in the monitor window.

Go down to video and select Huffyuv (lavc). Select Filters. You will get this window:

Select Interlacing. From the Available Filters list, select Decomb Telecide, press the green add button. Then do the same for Decomb Decimate. Check the preview button and scrub through a few frames. If something doesn't look right select Telecide or Decimate and play around with the internal settings until you find a combination that works.

Apparently on Love Hina and Irresponsible Captain Tylor produce excellent results at default, Nadesico is acceptable (and probably could be be played with more), and Boku no Marie was unfilterable. This has as much to do with the original production as it does with the limitations of the filter package on Avidemux. As the DVD series get older, so to does it appear that there are not enough filters to deal with complicating factors like dot crawl or rainbowing that can effect the ITVC and deint processes work. However, there is a very good chance that the boxed set you just bought last week will work with a combination of settings. For the record, I used TokiKake for this guide and my configuration looked like this:

Telecide:

Decimate:

I also didn't feel I had to denoise, temporally smooth, etc. There are plenty of other filters available for that, but for TokiKake I didn't need them. Several of them have been ported from Avisynth, and should work the same (except you are selecting values by the configuration windows, not by typing them in a script).

Next, add Crop from your transform tab and get rid of any unsightly edges or black space. Unlock aspect ratio. Resize dimensions to 640x480 for 4:3 or 848x480 for 16:9. Resize Method via Lanzcos3. This is an Avisynth port.

At any time you can hit preview to see how the filters are working together.

IV. Finishing Up

Exit out of the filter menu and watch your output (either alone or on the left side) to make sure you haven't missed anything major. If you have, try, try again. If you haven't, then simply save as YOURHUFFY.AVI, if your editing program doesn't like AVIs, move to the .MOV container via MPEGStreamClip or SimpleMovieX and then drop into your editor, all ready to go. You may return to Avidemux to convert your final project from to an x264/MP4 file for distribution.

I have included Before and After x264 encodes of TokiKake. Please look at them for an idea of the difference, and how much Avidemux's current porting of Avisynth filters is really helping out the PPC editor. Go drop them a line and tell them how freakin awesome they are so they'll add even more ports!

Me lieks. Definitely Kio for most helpful. You just keep cranking them out.

Kinda funny that this is exactly what I do on my Intel Macbook. Well more or less.A few things though:

1. If the source footage is 24 fps FILM than deinterlacing is not necessary, amirite?

2. I can't seem to get your link to MacTheRipper to work. And I believe that the link is for 2.6. It might be good to download 3 instead. I needed both for my latest rips. It was strange, they seem to handle ARccOS differently. Well anyway, MTR 3, MTR 2. You'll need Stuffit Expander (the free one will do) for version 3, sorry about that.

3. You didn't say much about audio... we should be going Audio > Main Track > Audio Source > None, right?

4. Just FYI for anyone, Avidemux will split the export at 4GBs. You can turn the splitting off by clicking Avidemux > Preferences > Output and clicking on the box for Create Open DML Files.

Although when I tried this the file behaved strangely. It only played (in final cut) up until where the 4 GBs would've been but the file was much larger than 4GBs. In VLC, however, once it reached the end of the video (which was where it stopped in final cut), it kept going almost as if it was streaming. It was indeed odd. Do you happen to know what was going on, Kio?

For some reason, I just now noticed this thread...

MAC is a cosmetics brand. Mac is the superior computing platform. It's not an acronym.

I installed Perian, but I can't seem to find it. I tried other stuff like Huffyuv (avocodec), MPEG-4 ASP (lavc), MPEG-4 AVC9 (x264), but my filters never work and the audio is either gone or is totally off-sync.